1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that executes a drawing process based on print data and forms images on recording paper based on generated image data for output, such as printers and multifunctional peripherals (MFPs). More particularly, the present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, image forming system, method of processing image data for output that executes an image outputting process without drawing image data for print data to be processed, a program to implement the process described above, and a storage medium that stores the program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sometimes a user browses articles such as newspaper articles and web pages reported via various media and prints out those articles that the user browsed, storing them in the form of a recordation on paper. Regarding web pages, after receiving a command to print out a web page acquired from a network and browsed, a personal computer (PC) converts it to print data in a format that apparatuses such as printers and MFPs can process, and sends the generated print data as print commands to these output apparatuses. A printer driver installed in the PC generates the print data, which consists of various drawing objects such as text, graphics, and images, and the print data is printed under conditions corresponding to attributes of each drawing object. Also, regarding newspaper articles printed on paper, after scanning a document to be processed by using an image scanner, the image data generated by the scanner is converted to image data for printing out, and a printer generates (copies) images on paper by using the image data in a format suitable for storing.
Conventionally, when a user browses web pages that mainly contain text information and requests to print out necessary web pages, a printer driver generates print data that contains all data including image data in addition to text data in the page to be processed and a printing process is executed by using the generated print data. However, the page to be printed out sometimes includes advertisements and the like that have no relation to the content of the original article on the page. Also, in many cases, these kinds of advertisements and the like use large image sizes and vivid colors to make a strong impact on consumers. Some users do not need such images and under these circumstances it is waste of resources to print them out.
To cope with this issue, when a user prints out a web page, a method to eliminate data that the user does not need from data that consists of the browsed web page has been proposed (e.g., JP-2007-257069-A.) In JP-2007-257069-A, a method is employed using an elimination list of advertisement Uniform Resource Locaters (URLs) to be eliminated linked to banner advertisements to delete the banner advertisements in case of printing a web page and generates print data ignoring tags that contain URLs in the elimination list in case of printing the web page.
However, the method described above eliminates only those banner advertisements linked to URLs in the elimination list, and is insufficient in terms of eliminating print-out of unnecessary image information that has no relation to the content of an article with mainly text information and cutting waste generated by printing unnecessary images.